Wednesday, April 16, 2003

I've had a very good eating week. Saturday, on my way to the nursery, I stopped off at a Yunnanese food stall by the MRT for chicken curry with jasmine rice and a green papaya salad. Leaving the nursery, Ginny took me to the best chicken nugget food stand in Taipei, just around the corner from the Wellcome Supermarket in Tienmu. These aren't processed bits with essence of chicken flavor, but real chicken chunks, fried till crispy. You can get spicy powder sprinkled on them. That evening, I met up Joaquin, Mate, Jen, and Angela at Kunming, an Indian restaurant. This was my first time eating Indian food in Taipei, yum! By Sunday, I was in the mood to eat Chinese food again, and I had dinner at a small, unassuming restaurant just down the block from my acupressurist. The place was completely full, with others waiting to dine, at 6:30 p.m.

Yesterday, I treated my colleagues to afternoon tea. I wanted to expand their cultural taste buds, so I prepared hummous, roasted eggplant dip, and sun-dired tomato and pesto goat cheese dip, served with whole-wheat tortillas and french bread (I didn't know where to find pita bread, so I improvised with the tortillas, which my colleague Jenny had brought back for me on her last trip to the States). My colleagues were quite fascinated by the tortillas and the dips. Most of the ingredients were actually not that hard to find, once I knew where to go. But the composition of flavors was new to them.

I didn't realize how lucky I was to have lived in major cities in the U.S. There, it's easy to sample a variety of cuisines in the course of a week: burritos one night, falafel the next...Thai, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, French, nouvelle American, fusion...of course, there's a greater depth of Chinese and Taiwanese available here, but as an American, I suppose I'm spoiled for choice.